Posts Tagged ‘power’

The answer has been the same for over 2500 years. The possibility/likelihood of demagoguery and mob rule. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t have direct democracy – though there’s something close to a version of it in the USA. We have representative democracy, which is actually a check on ‘too much democracy’, because the representatives who are then voted on by the people (and I’m talking here about our Westminster system and to a lesser extent the US congressional system) are given their opportunity to serve in parliament/congress by an ‘elite’, or an in-group (of course there are problems with in-groups which I won’t get into here). Often they’re tapped on the shoulder or receive a late night phone call from a party apparatchik and told ‘X is retiring at the next election and I notice you’ve been active in that electorate and have held position A and B for the party, would you be interested in running for the seat?’ It’s likely the apparatchik isn’t operating on her own initiative – party officials have been observing the prospective candidate and how many party boxes she’s been ticking. So there’s this behind-the-scenes selection process going on before anything ‘democratic’ occurs. And this, IMHO, is a good thing. You don’t want just anybody even helping to run the country, let alone running it. I mean, just look at the USA.

Under the Westminster system there no Presidents, Vice Presidents or powerful unelected officials selected by the President. Yes there are chiefs of staff, private secretaries and advisors in official and unofficial capacities, but there is no unelected Secretary of State, Defence, the Treasury and so forth, who all owe their jobs to the President, albeit subject to some review.

Under the Westminster system there is a head of state whose position is entirely ceremonial. Everything she signs is at the direction of the party elected to power. That party has a leader, the Prime Minister, the first minister, primus inter pares, first among equals, the captain of the team. She works in the parliament, sitting alongside her colleagues, opposite her opposite number, consulting, sparring, winning debates, losing debates, triumphing and being humiliated on a daily basis. There’s no separate ‘executive’ space, there are no veto powers, shut-down powers, special executive powers and the like. Pardoning powers are limited, and not granted to the Prime Minister. In Australia, that power is granted to the Attorney-General, in Britain to the Lord Chancellor, but decisions are made in consultation with the whole of government. Power, in short, is more distributed under the Westminster system, and this is surely a good thing. I mean, just look at the USA.

Under the Westminster system there is only one set of national elections, not two. Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – the four primary predominantly English-speaking nations who use the system – all vary as to electoral terms. In Australia, elections are held approximately every 3 years, but on no fixed dates (but elections are always held on a Saturday, and voting is compulsory). These elections are roughly similar to the US mid-term elections. People vote for their local member, based on that member’s campaign, her personal qualities, and the platform of the party she belongs to, if any. There are two major parties, of the right and left, and each party has its leader, elected by elected members of parliament. If that party holds power, she will be the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister therefore holds her position at the behest of the governing party. If the governing (or any) party loses faith in its leader, they can oust her through a vote of no-confidence, after which they will hold an internal round of voting for a new leader. The ousted leader then may or may not hold another cabinet position in government, or go to the ‘back bench’ as an ordinary elected MP. Thus, a Prime Minister may be removed from office between elections, though this is generally inadvisable as it is seen by the public as destabilising. It is a very different case, however, from removing a President from office, about which there appears to be no clear guidelines. The heavy reliance upon a President and his powers and duties appears to have created a degree of paralysis when it becomes clear that the President is manifestly unfit for office and has engaged in criminal activities before becoming President, during his campaign, and while in office. Under the Westminster system such a person would have been removed from office well before now, and it’s unlikely that such a person would ever have been placed in that office in the first place, since her appeal would not be directly to the people but to the party she is a member of. A person with an extremely shady reputation would be unlikely to appeal to a political party obsessed with the lack of rectitude of its opposite number, and therefore with its own rectitude.

A note on the separation of powers. The idea originated with Montesquieu (1748) who separated the duties of government into three, the legislative, the executive and the judicial. However, under the Westminster system, the legislative and executive branches are essentially fused. This may have strengths and weaknesses, which are alleviated through oppositional and bicameral scrutiny, as well as the democratic process. The executive and the legislative forces of government are always in dynamic interaction, so that too much fusion and too much separation can be inimical to good government. In the USA, the physical separation between the legislative and the executive appears to be the source of a wealth of political problems.

Under the Westminster system there is no direct election of any person or persons by the whole nation, either through an electoral college or by means of a first-past-the-post nationwide vote. This is a useful if not essential curb to the dangers of demagoguery. Although there is no official screening of candidates (as I believe there should be), by means, for example, of a basic political literacy test, involving an understanding of the nation’s political and legal structures, its political history, the separation of powers and other pertinent matters (scientific literacy might be included), there is at least some screening to ensure party loyalty and understanding of party policies and goals. The Presidential electoral system involves no screening, formal or informal, a fact which some people appear to view with pride.

There is no immunity from criminal prosecution for a Prime Minister in Australia, Britain, Canada or New Zealand. The Queen as titular head of state, and her representatives (the Governor-General in Australia) may be immune, but that’s hardly an issue for government. There are some protections from civil proceedings while in office, but it would be an expectation that criminal acts of politicians would be treated like those of anyone else, or even more expeditiously considering the position of public trust they hold. Although such criminal proceedings would be scandalous, they need not affect government to a debilitating degree because of the distributed nature of political power and the flexibility of government roles under the Westminster system – unless, of course, the criminality was spread throughout government or opposition ranks, which would be a rare thing. In any case, look at the USA for comparison.

Under the Westminster system there is, of course, no such thing as impeachment. That’s because illegal conduct is dealt with by the law, and other ‘conduct unbecoming’ or conduct contrary to party ideology or ethics is dealt with by no-confidence motions. A no-confidence motion needs no external justification other than that the leader has lost the confidence of her party. If the electorate as a whole disagrees with the motion it will make its view clear at the next election, or at by-elections, which can serve to restrict the power of government, or send a message by reducing its majority.

Finally, there appears to be another, perhaps less tangible difference between Westminster system countries and the Presidential system of the USA. It is rare to hear residents of Westminster system countries representing themselves as partakers of the world’s first and greatest democracy, leaders of the free world, the light on the hill and so forth. Nationalism and jingoism appears to permeate US society like no other. Such parochialism isn’t conducive to self-analysis and reform. It needs to be pointed out, if we wish to talk of ‘true democracy’, that no nation was ever anywhere near full democracy until it granted full voting rights to the female half of the population. On that very reasonable basis, New Zealand was the first true democracy. Australia, Britain and Canada all granted women the right to vote before the USA did – though in Australia, Aboriginal people of both genders weren’t granted the vote until 1962, so Australia cannot be considered a true democracy till that date. But the US Presidential system, in its difference, also represents something else – US individualism, as represented in many Hollywood movies in which one quasi-superhero saves the world more or less single-handed in the teeth of official lethargy, incompetence or corruption. It can be argued that nations can be found on an individualist-collectivist spectrum, with the USA somewhat at one end of the spectrum, the individualist end, and a country like Japan close to the collectivist end. The problem with individualism is a lack of trust in government – if not a lack of trust in each other – resulting in poor support for collective action on education, health and other social goods, and also high incarceration rates. Collectivism suffers the opposite problem, lack of willingness to speak out, to criticise, to behave differently, to seek reform when needed, though it also tends to mean reduced crime rates and genuine respect for others.

What this means for the genuine crisis the USA finds itself in is anyone’s guess. Having allowed a person with no moral compass and little understanding of the world to bypass the checks and balances of party allegiance and teamwork by appealing to a sector of the population which he actively despises (people who actually work for a living, or try to) in order to become their all-too-powerful President, the USA has deservedly lost a great deal of standing in the global community. And because of the way their system operates – so very differently from the Westminster system – the slow-motion train wreck which began with this person’s ascension to the Presidency is very far from over, and one really begins to wonder if this is the beginning of the end of the US ascendency. I for one hope not. The USA is a great, flawed nation. It can do better than this. It can recover. It can reform itself. It might look, for starters, at the Westminster system.

There have been many most important countries in the world throughout human history. Usually self-styled. They become important through economic and military success. And they think, everyone of them, that this success gives them moral authority. This is the fundamental error of every powerful state in history, so tedious to relate. The fact is that Americans are no way morally superior to Mexicans, Australians or Koreans, or whoever. Every country, or state, or tribe, is full of individual humans striving equally to thrive – like every other life form.

If you believe, however, that you’re a member of the most important country in the world, that may play on your mind a little. It may move you, just a little, to believe, just a little, that you’re just a little more important than people from less important countries.

What does it mean though, to be more important? Is it about power? We can think of an elephant being a more powerful animal than a squirrel, but does that make her more important?

Maybe importance can be measured by imagining the country, or animal, not existing. If the USA, and all its people, disappeared tomorrow, that would have a much bigger impact than if, say, Fiji and all its people disappeared, and presumably not just because this compares 325 million with less than one million. A better comparison would be between the USA and China or India. Both these countries have more people than the USA but are less important, according to Zacharia.

I’m guessing that Zacharia’s presumably offhand description of US importance has mostly to do with that country’s impact on the world. This surely gets to the nub of the matter. But this surely has no moral dimension. I’m not sure whether Zacharia meant to suggest a moral dimension to the USA’s importance.

My view is that nations are like animals. Large animals tend to leave a larger footprint, metaphorically speaking. The main focus of any animal or nation is to sustain itself, and more. Other nations, or animals, are seen as a means to that end. So nations will see other nations as either exploitable (prey), helpful in the exploitation of others, dangerous (predators), or simply irrelevant. True, there are symbiotic relationships, and exploitation is perhaps a loaded word, but the world of the living goes on living by consuming other living beings. At least, that’s how it has gone on so far.

Important countries consume more. Maybe that’s a negative, but they may do so by being smarter, or by hitting upon some clever and effective ruses before anyone else. So size isn’t everything, though it helps. Also, their cleverness or effectiveness teaches others – their prey as well as interested observers. They make the world wise up, quicken up. Remember the Mongols, an important nation of the past, or Hannibal, an important general.

But I feel I’m being too male, thinking too much on destruction and aggression. The importance of nations today should be, and generally is, based on a different kind of cleverness, ingenuity, innovation. Yet we find this everywhere, as ideas spread more quickly than ever before. A young African boy generates wind energy for his village through internet-based DIY. This is important, and a great leveller.

The internet is still largely American, and so on that basis alone, the USA should rightly view itself as the most important nation in the information age. Or is it simply the English language that has become most important? Science and technology are international, of course, but must be translated into English, if required, for best effect. This has been so for some time – think Mendel’s 1865 paper on the laws of segregation and independent assortment. It didn’t appear in English until 1901, years after Mendel’s death, as a result of some pioneers finally lighting upon it. English is surely an important language.

So what would happen if the USA suddenly disappeared under the waves, with all its people, its weaponry and other technology, its industry? This would be a terrible tragedy, of course, for those loved and loving ones left behind. And yet, in the information age, surprisingly little, if any, of the technology and industry would be lost. The internet would survive, and with it the means for making bombs, multiple examples of beautiful or other people having orgiastic fun for the tutelage of our youth, the Khan Academy’s video lessons on physics, chemistry and assorted other subjects, and an endless variety of examples of dog, cat, bird, elephant, octopus and other cleverness, or silliness. In short, the human world would certainly progress, or continue, more or less unabated, proving that, however important the USA is, it isn’t indispensable.

But surely, if the USA disappeared, another country would take its turn as the most important country in the world. And what then, and which?

That’s a very interesting question. The USA won’t, of course, disappear below the waves, and many if not most Americans firmly believe that their country must remain the most important for a long long time into the future. As did the British in their heyday, and the Romans, and the Egyptians, and the Sumerians, no doubt. And yet, our human world goes on, and seems to progress, with all its rises and declines.

They say that China will be the next most important country. I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. I’m skeptical of it happening as long as China retains its current political form. The age of major military conquest is over, I believe, so conquest will have to be of a different type, a much more subtle type, perhaps more subtle than I’m capable of foreseeing at present. Too many nations have sampled, for too long, the flavour of freedom, participation and dissent to be guiled by China’s top-down, controlling approach to administration. China will become more and more of an outlier. In any case, I don’t see the USA relinquishing its prominent position ‘any time soon’, as the Americans like to say. Ever the optimist, I’m hoping that the USA will bounce back from the Trump debacle with a much-reformed political system (especially with respect to presidential power and accountability), a renewed commitment to international relations, and a chastened sense of its failings and fragility, and the limits of its democracy..

But it’s important, always, to remember that nations are not people, and that people are always more important than nations.

There are undoubtedly billions of worthier subjects to focus on than Trump, but I do find it hard to look away for long from the slow-moving train wreck – and I’m still nursing my prediction that he’ll be out by year’s end. Of course I keep stumbling at obstacles, and anything that gets in the way of justice being the same for everyone seems to me an unnecessary and illegitimate obstacle. Now it’s this ridiculous notion that you shouldn’t charge a President around election time. It’s bullshit. It should be absolutely clear that you should charge any felon precisely when all is in order to charge him, no matter what time of year it is.

But that apparently isn’t how it goes in the USA, and so we have to wait for two whole months to bring charges, assuming this ‘etiquette’ is followed. And then what happens after the mid-term fall-out? Too close to Christmas?

Needless to say, I’m completely opposed to the truly criminal notion that you can’t charge a head of state while in office. Only in America is such a notion even thinkable – a testament to one of the worst political systems in the western world.

Anyway, no sense bemoaning a system that the US Congress, fourth estate and intelligentsia are too jingoistic to even be capable of examining let alone reforming. So instead I’ll focus here on the legal jeopardy Trump finds himself in from various directions, as we wait for the Mueller team to hopefully finish him off.

Firstly the Michael Cohen case. Cohen is currently out on bail awaiting sentencing on eight criminal counts he has pleaded guilty to. According to this article in The Hill, from August 21, Cohen won’t be sentenced until December 12, which seems an eternity to me. It’s expected that he’ll do a fair amount of jail time.

What has this to do with Trump? Cohen was his fixer and I’m not sure how many of the felonies he’ll be sentenced on relate to Trump or his organisation. Some reports claim that more than one felony relates to the 2016 campaign. What is clear is that Cohen seems bent on revenge for the way Trump, who never treated him particularly well in spite of his loyalty, dropped him like a hot potato shortly after Cohen’s offices and home were raided by the FBI. In pleading guilty to one charge of campaign violations relating to the Stormy Daniels payment, Cohen implicated Trump as the person who directed his activities. This should have led directly to Trump’s arrest, but for some reason this hasn’t happened. In any case it stands to reason that whatever Cohen’s sentence on this particular count, Trump’s should be greater, as the ‘Mr Big’ in this case.

Of course Trump’s legal jeopardy from the Cohen direction is probably, or hopefully, more considerable than just the Stormy matter. Cohen struck a plea deal with the SDNY, clearly in the hope of getting a lighter sentence in return for dirt on Trump, but the plea deal seems to have been minimal, most likely because the Mueller team, who are surely in close contact with SDNY, have enough dirt on Trump already (particularly from the raid on Cohen’s offices and home, conducted by the SDNY, but nothing prevents the FBI from sharing information – in fact such sharing is essential), and they don’t like working with criminals if they can help it. Still, they may call on Cohen if they need to, which all spells trouble for Trump. Meanwhile, Emily Jane Fox writes In Vanity Fair (September 11) that Cohen’s attorney is set to meet New York State tax officials who are looking into the Trump Organisation’s finances. Hopefully Cohen will have more damning stuff on that topic. I should also add that it’s this SDNY probe into Cohen that has granted immunity to the CFO of the Trump Organisation, as well as to David Pecker, chief of the National Enquirer, a gutter mag dedicated to spruiking Trump’s ‘qualities’ and to ‘catching and killing’ negative stories about him. So, more legal jeopardy there.

Secondly, on those New York State tax officials. A Washington Post article from July 20 revealed that the state’s tax agency is investigating Trump’s personal charity (sic), the Trump Foundation. New York’s embattled governor, Andrew Cuomo, who appears to have launched the investigation under pressure from constituents, has said that the probe could lead to criminal charges. Trump’s children would be involved as well as himself.

Thirdly, the tax probe comes on the heels of a civil suit, filed in June by the New York Attorney-General, claiming that Trump and three of his children ran a charity ‘engaged in persistently illegal conduct.’ The Attorney-General’s department has been considering pursuing criminal charges, but apparently there’s a race to become the next Attorney-General there, and the Democratic candidates are all promising to go after Trump if elected. They’re hoping to focus on the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, which is altogether a good thing. Not being well up on how the US electoral system works, I’m not sure how long it will take for this all to be sorted, but it definitely looks like there will be an annihilation of Republicans in the mid-terms, and this Attorney-General race will be caught up in that. So, more trouble for Trump.

Fourthly, the next Manafort trial starts soon, and it involves Russia. Manafort is apparently trying to negotiate a plea deal as I write, one that won’t involve dumping on Trump, and won’t involve actually going through the trial process. It’s hard to imagine that happening. An article in Fortune, out yesterday (September 13) claims that a deal has more or less been struck, but it’s hard to imagine such a deal not involving Trump. This deal may be announced as early as today. Considering that the Mueller team holds all the cards – a slam-dunk set of convictions on the second trial, and the possibility of retrying the ten counts that were left undecided in the first trial, it’s hard to imagine that Mueller wouldn’t have extracted some damning evidence about Trump, the campaign, and Russian money in exchange for any deal. Maybe Trump won’t be touting Manafort as a ‘great guy’ for much longer – but on the other hand, Manafort may just be lookingfor a way to avoid the expense of a court case he can’t win, and he’s hanging out for a pardon from Trump.

And fifthly, the Mueller probe itself. I see it dividing into three parts – conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and financial crimes.

Conspiracy charges will depend on whether Trump and/or his campaign knew about the Russian interference in the 2016 elections, an interference amply documented in the two speaking indictments, in February and July of this year, which together charged 25 Russian individuals and three Russian companies with hacking of servers and hijacking of social media sites to influence the election outcome, entirely in Trump’s favour. No American citizens were charged, but other persons ‘known and unknown’ to the investigators were repeatedly mentioned. The second indictment also raised profound suspicions that the Trump campaign had knowledge of the hacking, because of certain dates matching comments at the time by Trump himself. Apart from this there is the meeting at Trump Tower on June 9 2016, which I personally think is less significant, but about which there have clearly been cover-ups and lies by the Trump campaign and administration, including by Trump himself. It has always appeared to me highly likely that Mueller has an abundance of material on this conspiracy.

On obstruction, although much of the focus here has been on the firing of James Comey for the illicit reason of trying to stop the Russia investigation, it seems clear to me that the relentless public attacks on the Mueller enquiry, the FBI and the DoJ, and the hounding of specific officers within those departments, are all very serious cases of obstruction of justice, so flagrant and criminal in intent in fact that they should have warranted dismissal from office long ago. These are questions, of course, about the limits to free speech, but one would think that such limits would indeed apply to the Head of State when speaking of cases in which he himself is implicated. The more power you have to influence, the more responsibility you should bear in speaking of such institutions as investigating services, the judiciary and the free press, a matter which should be inscribed in law. In any case it’ll be interesting to see what the enquiry’s findings are on this topic. They should be fulsome.

On financial misdealings and any other bits and pieces of criminality that might be uncovered during the enquiry, There’s potentially a lifetime of stuff there. It’s pretty certain that Mueller has all the tax returns, and knows a thing or two about Deutsche Bank’s dodgy dealings with Trump. This is the most murky of areas, obviously, but there are outstanding financial experts on Mueller’s team who’ll be having a wonderful time joining all the dots.

So who knows when the fireworks will start, but I’ll be happy to be viewing them from a safe distance. Meanwhile I’ll try, really try, to focus on other things for a couple of months.

Canto: So while listening to the commentariat buzzing about the latest Trumpian debacle (you can take your pick), I’ve noticed the term ‘American exceptionalism’ being tossed about, whether in jest or earnest I’m not sure. What do you think it means?

Jacinta: Well we’ve already highlighted American jingoism, which is an across-the-spectrum problem, though more common among those who haven’t travelled much. It worries me more when I hear it from pundits who should know better, because people who think they’re exceptional tend not to be too self-critical. And Americans need to be more critical than ever, of their political system, which has brought them to this pass.

Canto: Yes, we’ve talked about this before but I recall a pundit saying, a few months ago, that America’s founding as a nation was in response to a tyrant – whom he named as the British monarch, George III – so why were they apparently descending into a tyranny now? But this wasn’t quite the story was it?

Jacinta: That’s right. The Brits had executed one of their monarchs a century and a half before the formation of the American state, precisely for being overly intransigent and tyrannical. Then a half-century later they threw out another one for similar reasons. George III was a constitutional monarch, and it was parliament that was making decisions about the American colony. Of course Britain wasn’t a fully representative democracy at the time, but then neither was the new American state – only 6% of the population was allowed to vote in their first Presidential election. It has taken centuries for western countries, including the US, to arrive at full adult suffrage. There are no exceptions in this.

Canto: There’s an article here by a presumably American professor of international relations at Harvard which punctures the American exceptionalism myth, and it says much that we already know, that powerful nations, regardless of their internal politics, are always keen to maintain and expand their sphere of power and influence, and that tends to be the basis of their foreign policy. That explains Britain’s behaviour in the ‘new world’ as much as it explains US behaviour in the Philippines and the Pacific, and in Vietnam and Iraq. The US has been expansionist since the get-go, and it shouldn’t take that much self-critical analysis to understand why so many regions of the world despise the very term “American’. This doesn’t make Americans exceptionally bad, but we should surely have reached a point in our progressive development to realise that foreign lives matter as much as those of our own nation.

Jacinta: Yet again and again, amongst even the liberal commentariat, we get comments like ‘leader of the free world’, ‘the checks and balances that make us stand apart from other nations’, ‘the nation that others look to’, ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ and other thought-free shibboleths. And now more than ever, as their nation has been brought down through allowing a clearly unqualified and inadequate boy-king to become their head of state, with powers far beyond his capacities, Americans need to take a good hard look at themselves and their political system rather than simply moaning about the boy-king and hoping that the system can withstand him. A better system would have dealt with him long before he ever got to this position.

Canto: But really, can you prove this? Can you give examples?

Jacinta: Well no system is perfect but let’s look at the recent meeting of Trump and Putin. Of course it would be silly to compare Australia with the USA in this regard – Putin would have no interest in a meeting with our PM – but any country under the Westminster system – say the UK – would have much the same checks and balances. And this is the thing – a Prime Minister under that system would see her role in very different terms, generally, from the President under the US system. She is first and foremost the leader of her party in Parliament, and is present in Parliament every day that it sits, leading the arguments and being informed, whether she likes it or not, of the dissension and divisions within her own party as well as the contrary views of the opposition. So a meeting with a major and adversarial head of state would inevitably be a matter thrashed out in Parliament, with the PM taking part in the debate. And of course, being closeted together in Parliament House with the Foreign Minister and other relevant ministers is a very different situation for the national leader than being completely separated from Congress and surrounded by mostly hand-picked underlings who are simply paid to do her (or I should now say, his) bidding. A recipe for disaster, if not dictatorship. Not to mention, as I already have elsewhere, the host of privileges and responsibilities vested in the ‘commander-in-chief’ and accorded to no other national leader in a democratic country. The fact that this sort of system is seen, by far too many Americans, as a shining example to all nations is surely proof that the US is exceptional only in its jingoism and its hubris.

Canto: Well that’s pretty strong stuff, and I’m not sure I entirely agree with you, and I’m not sure you answered my question. What’s to prevent a Trump-like figure becoming Prime Minister of Australia?

Jacinta: I thought I’d explained. Our national elections are not fought out between Mr Conservative and Ms Liberal, one or other to be head of state. They’re fought on a mixture of local and national interests, essentially in the manner of the US mid-terms. We’re voting, essentially, for the party we want in power, as well as a local member we like (for those few who keenly follow politics) and we give due consideration to the leader of that party, always knowing that if that leader underperforms or is found to be corrupt or whatever, there are other elected representatives that can replace him, as quite often happens…

Canto: But even in Australia a situation could occur that a, shall we say unconventional, but very popular figure emerges, with a populist false-promises agenda that appeals to the masses (in a manner largely incomprehensible, if not reprehensible, to the elites), so the party – and surely it would be the Right – might batten on to her as its principle means of gaining and holding onto power – a Faustian bargain and all that – and vote her into the PM position…

Jacinta: Well everything’s possible in the worst of all possible worlds, but it’s far more unlikely. When Trump first started his bid, his candidacy was hugely unpopular within the Republican Party, so he took his message, such as it was, to the people. That’s to say, he worked out as he went along what his people lapped up most voraciously and he fed it to them. As many pundits over there are saying, he’s transformed most of the Republican party, and even more of the voters, into his lapdogs and willing enablers – ‘the party of Lincoln!’ as the Republican never-Trumpers moan. There’s really no opportunity for that to happen within the Westminster system. We have elections between two established parties, in the main, and they often have two established leaders, who owe their positions to party discipline. They’re not in a position to go rogue like Trump has done. And if one of the parties has a shiny new leader she’ll be more likely to toe the party line because she’s not yet established and because she knows the election is about far more than just her. We don’t have any simple person v person elections, except in small by-elections, and hopefully never will.

Canto: Well, I think you’re right, but it’s notable that, in all the noise from the free press from over there, there’s precious little soul-searching about the political system that has permitted someone so obviously inappropriate to hold an office that gives him so much power. Everyone knows that great power should come with great responsibility. Every sensible person in the USA is raging about Trump’s irresponsibility, but virtually nobody is raging about a political system that enables someone of his type to gain this enormous power without sufficient checking, and nobody seems to have anticipated how he could find means, in his blustering way, to extend a power that is already massive to an almost ridiculous degree.

Jacinta: So yes, that’s the real exceptionalism. The US bangs on about being the greatest democracy, but democracy by itself isn’t enough. Most people who vote – no matter what country they’re in – know precious little about how their government works, about foreign relations and trade, about history, about developments in science and technology, even about systems that protect their own welfare, so they’re susceptible to false-promising demagogues, especially if they feel they’re struggling more than they should. Concerns about democracy and demagoguery have been voiced loudly since the days of Plato and Aristotle. The US seems to have been exceptionally deaf about them. The bulwarks against demagoguery are not, as pundits keeps saying, institutions of democracy, they’re institutions of an open society. The free press is a meritocracy, owing its duty to the facts and the evidence, not to ‘the people’. The same goes for the judiciary, which owe its duty to the law and its judicious interpretation according to precedent and the given facts and evidence. The science and technology sector should be at arm’s length from the government, owing its credibility to the independent interpretation of data and confirmation of hypotheses, always subject to peer review. Now, to some extent, I’m talking about an ideal here – I’m sure no government is perfectly open in this way. But Trump has, in his blunderingly self-serving style, corrupted the free press and the judiciary in the minds of ‘his’ people, turned his nation’s formidable foes into his nation’s friends and vice versa, and made America a kind of monstrous laughing-stock worldwide. And there’s another problem – he will not give up his Presidency. He will not. And it will certainly get worse. So that’s a problem for their country’s responsible adults to deal with. I wish them well.

veteran federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, bullish criminal fraud expert and key member of the Mueller team

Canto: The good thing about the Mueller investigation, or ‘special counsel enquiry’, is its broad terms of reference, as we Australians would describe it. The brief of the enquiry is to investigate any links and/or co-ordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matter that arose or may arise directly from the investigation…

Jacinta: So that would include obstructing justice, but I’m not sure that the firing of James Comey, then head of the FBI, in May 2017, will fit the ‘obstruction of justice’ category.

Canto: But the FBI were investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump more or less admitted, just after firing Comey, that it was because of the ‘Russia thing’.

Jacinta: ‘More or less’ isn’t good enough, and it could be argued that justice wasn’t obstructed because Comey’s firing led directly to the Mueller investigation.

Canto: Okay forget obstructing justice, at least for now, I was going to talk about money. That’s to say, matters arising directly from the investigation. That’s how Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were indicted. They were lobbying for the pro-Russian faction in Ukraine, in particular the disgustingly villainous Viktor Yanukovych, but were involved, not incidentally, in massive money-laundering schemes. So they’re in big trouble, and it’s well known that Trump and his family are up to their ears in Russian money, and if Trump’s finances aren’t dodgy, then the term dodgy surely has no meaning. Mueller’s team, detailed here, ‘possess a vast array of experience investigating financial fraud, corruption, money laundering, foreign bribery, and organized crime’. A perfect bunch to catch out Trump.

Jacinta: You’re making a few assumptions here about Trump’s corruption. Yes he’s a bullshit artist, he doesn’t have any normal concept of the truth, he’s ignorant, he’s inhumane, he’s a bully and much more. That doesn’t make him a criminal. If he was involved in the kind of activities Manafort was involved in, he surely would’ve been indicted by now.

Canto: They may have enough to indict him, but doing so would bring the investigation to a spectacular halt. His indictment might be the cherry on the cake, the last thing to add. First they’ll be spiralling in on the family, Kushner and Trump Jr…

Jacinta: You’re sounding like the most optimistic anti-Trump pundit, imagining they already have mountains of evidence, they’re just adding to the pile to make this the most spectacular house-of-cards downfall in US history, for which their names (I mean the Mueller team) will be covered in eternal glory. I’m a little sceptical.

Canto: Trump has never produced his tax returns and I’m assuming he has much to hide. His companies declared bankruptcy four times in the early nineties, and two more times in the 2000s. It came to the point where the only bank that would lend to him was Deutsche Bank, a financial institution that was at the same time heavily into laundering Russian money. And it’s no secret that Trump and his family are heavily indebted to Russian oligarchs – super-rich members of Putin’s kleptocracy. Naturally they’re expecting a quid pro quo. This is where the interference lies – Trump’s indebtedness and the Russian government’s expectations.

Jacinta: But has Russia really benefitted, apart from Trump’s fawning over Putin? There was talk of the Trump administration going easy on Russia in exchange for dirt on Clinton, but it hasn’t actually happened has it? Trump’s personal indebtedness to Russians, if proven, doesn’t prove that he or his team conspired with Russians to subvert the US political/democratic system. I mean, there’s no doubt the Russians have been trying to subvert the American, and British and French and other western governments, and they were working toward a Trump victory in 2016 for obvious reasons, but whether or not they conspired directly with the Trump team, that’s unclear. Certainly the Russians would’ve tried to, but did they actually succeed, and what evidence has there been of a quid pro quo?

Canto: We don’t know, but it’s likely that Mueller’s team does. They’ve subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for documents relating to Trump and his family’s finances, though this has been denied by Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow. Deutsche Bank is about the only major bank in the world willing to lend to Trump, and it was found guilty of laundering some $10 billion dollars of Russian money last year. Kushner received a loan of $285 million from Deutsche Bank in 2016, just before election day. The Mueller investigators will know much much more about this than we or any reporters do. It’s about connecting the dots, to quote one reporter, between the Trump and Kushner finances, Deutsche Bank and Putin and his billionaire kleptocrats. Apparently Trump and his companies have received no less than $3.5 billion in loans and loan-guarantee agreements from Deutsche Bank since 1998. It’s impossible to believe that Mueller’s lawyers aren’t shining all sorts of lights on all this murkiness and making more sense of it than has ever been made before. I look forward to the next indictment. It might be the most fateful one yet.

Jacinta: Okay, here’s a question. What exactly is money laundering?

Canto: Well, as the term suggests, it’s about turning dirty money into apparently clean stuff. Ill-gotten into ‘legit’. Though the term has become envaguened in recent years,

Jacinta: Good word.

Canto: Thanks, so now it just about covers all kinds of dodgy financial dealings, including terrorist financing. But the key, usually, is to give the appearance of legitimacy to money obtained illegally or wrongfully. And of course the variety of ways this can be done is just about endless. So let me tell you about the Deutsche Bank ‘mirror trade’ system. It was about accepting two trades at once that looked essentially equal and opposite, one in roubles, the other in dollars or other western currencies. These trades looked innocuous but their real purpose was to convert money, and to shift it out of Russia. This, inter alia, helped to ‘clean up’ the money, which was more often than not of dubious origin, given Putin’s kleptocracy.

Jacinta: Just a quick read of Deutsche Bank’s history reveals scandal after scandal, a history of corruption – fraud, price manipulation and so on… which makes me long to get off the topic of money-grubbing and kleptomania and political jiggery-pokery and back to sciencey subjects. I’ve had enough.

Canto: Okay, I’ll try to get my mind off the Trump spectacle – what will happen will happen. No more, I promise – for a while. Just let me end with a list of dictators Trump has lavished praise on. Of course there’s Russia’s Putin and Duterte of the Philippines, but there’s also Nursultan Nazarbayev, dictator of Kazakhstan for the last 25 years; Xi Jinping, long-time leader and now dictator of China, lover of execution and other forms of repression; Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Egypt’s new repressive macho-man; Recep Erdogan, the Turkish bag of shit; and he’s expressed approval of Kim Jong Un and even Saddam Hussein. In fact, anybody who doesn’t seize power for himself (no women allowed) and hold onto it for a long time is considered a lightweight…

Jacinta: Okay calm down, let’s look at different sorts of power in the future…

I’m no expert on US politics, or anything else for that matter, but it seems to me that the country’s current political woes, which are only set to get worse, are not so much due to Donald Trump but to a system that allowed him to become the President, and it’s that system that needs drastic reform if you don’t want your history to repeat on you like your foulest meal.

For example, Trump came to power from outside of politics, having never experienced political office under the discipline of a party machine. He was a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009, and has contributed more to Democrat pollies, including Hillary Clinton, than to Republicans, but it’s fairly obvious that his political allegiances are opportunistic. Of course, his ‘outsider cred’ was a main part of his attraction for dispossessed and disillusioned voters, but this is a problem with all democracies – the appeal of populist demagogues.

But why would someone like Trump have such an appeal in 2016? The Obama administration had left the country in pretty good shape, after having inherited the global financial crisis, which the USA itself largely caused through extremely dubious lending practices by its under-regulated banks in 2007. According to Bloomberg news, the US economy under Obama was second best of the previous five administrations, behind Clinton. However, it’s obvious that measuring the overall economy of such a diverse nation as the USA doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. A report by CNN Money, published between the election of Trump and his inauguration, adds further detail. The mega-wealthy, the top 1% of the population, are earning triple what they earned in the eighties, while the earnings of the bottom 50% haven’t changed in three decades. And it’s mostly this group (as well as that top percentile who hope to get even more) that Trump has targeted, in his half blundering, half cynical way, as marks for his circus act (though it would be invidious to compare him to P T Barnum, who was a philanthropist). It’s clear that many, probably most, Trump supporters have no interest or knowledge of the political process, in the USA or anywhere else, and their knowledge of Trump himself is limited to the fact that he’s ‘successful’ in ways that they’d like to be. They’re desperately drawn to the brashness, the indifference to rules, the lack of deference, the hatred of experts, the outsiderdom with its whiff of revolution, a re-evaluation of all values, where up is down and they, the forgotten people, will end up being magically up. That’s the hope, it seems, that out of the destruction of a system that has trodden them down for a lifetime, they might just escape with a whole lotta loot. Or something. Something better.

And that’s the sadness of it, because whatever Trump wants from the Presidency, it’s certainly not the chance to give anything away, or provide anyone any assistance. His whole life clearly proves that. But what I’m writing here is nothing new, and that’s the point. If it was only his potential marks and the super-rich who gave him the top job, I’d have different complaints to make, but he got there because many voted for him having no illusions about his character. And he also got there because, as Americans love to proclaim, anyone can become President, regardless of fitness, expertise, or even interest in what the job entails. No extreme vetting, no vetting at all – though money’s a pretty essential requirement. No interview, no test on governance, political history, the nation’s civic and judicial institutions, nothing remotely as rigorous as the test I had to sit a few years ago simply to become a citizen of the country I’d lived in for over fifty years. And yet this job requires you to take control of the world’s most powerful economy and the world’s most powerful military, and to negotiate with some of the most slippery and devious characters on the world stage – as dictators and oligarchs tend to be.

So think about this in terms of democracy. The USA likes to think of itself as the world’s greatest democracy. However, democracy’s greatest flaw was pointed out way back at its inception, two and a half millennia ago, by Plato and Aristotle, both unapologetic anti-democratic elitists. What they feared most was mob rule, fuelled by the limited populist talents of demagogues such as Cleon, a contemporary and opponent of Athens’ greatest statesman, Pericles. So what was their antidote to this poison? Essentially, it was experts and proven tradition. Plato, notoriously or not, thought philosophers would make the best rulers. Aristotle collected constitutions in order to find what institutions and instituted policies would lead to the most fruitful outcomes for city-states. Far apart though they were in many areas, both philosophers understood that knowledge and training were keys to good governance. Trump, on the other hand, has often extolled political ignorance as a virtue. Witness him boastfully introducing a key advisor, Hope Hicks, during a campaign rally, as someone completely ignorant of politics. That was what won her the job, he claimed – though he could have chosen anyone out of scores of millions if that was the criterion.

The USA is now paying a high price for putting its faith in Trump, his family members, and a bunch of hand-picked amateurs. And it provides the country with a lesson on the limits of democracy. We do put limits on democracy. It’s called representative democracy, a system of choosing a person to represent you, a person who usually belongs to one of two or more parties with different philosophies of government, though the philosophies are informal enough to provide a spectrum within them. That candidate has usually risen through the ranks of the party, understands something about party discipline, and has gained the respect of party associates. It’s an informal system rather than a rigorously formal one, and that’s useful as it provides flexibility, when for example an unusually gifted individual joins the team and is able to be fast-tracked into a leadership role. At the same time it’s formal enough to provide testing of team loyalty and respect. Loose and inter-subjective though it is, this is a kind of peer vetting that Trump has avoided and would be unlikely to survive. Could anyone imagine Trump doing the committee work, the political canvassing, the explanatory interviews and such that are essential for open government?

Another problem of democracy, as many have pointed out, is that every adult has an equal vote, regardless of their knowledge or understanding of the political parties they can vote for or how the political system actually works. Many of the less sophisticated might easily become enthused by populist types, especially in times like the present moment in the USA and elsewhere, when they feel they’re ‘outcast from life’s feast’. My recent reading of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was a stark reminder that in the ‘land of opportunity’ whole generations of families live in the direst conditions and struggle to make sense of a social system that offers them so little and treats them with more or less disdain. Trump promises jobs, jobs, jobs and protection from nasty Mexicans and Moslems and says he has a plan to make his country great again. This isn’t a message for middle class establishment types or lefty students. It’s for those who see themselves as disenfranchised and can’t find a way out, and suspect that the problem lies with others whose language and lifestyles and attitudes they don’t understand. Trump’s a rich tough guy who’ll rid his country of all the bad guys so that Real Americans will be set free to follow dreams they haven’t even been able to dream yet because they’re so busy fighting off the lazy blacks and latinos and the Islamic terrorists and the homos and the femocrats and the liberals who spur them on…

But Trump is fast finding that the Real Americans who fall for his bullshit aren’t as numerous as he first thought. And the numbers are falling. However, I’m probably being wildly optimistic. Still, here’s my prediction for 2018 in the USA. Trump won’t be in office by the end of the year. How he gets kicked out I’m not sure. The Special Inquiry into Russian collusion with the US election is an obvious possibility, his increasing unpopularity, which will fall to record lows, is another, the treatment of women as worthy/unworthy sex objects is another, and there will be further scandals not currently on the horizon. Currently Trump’s rating with American women is 24%. The candidates he backs in local elections keep failing. His ‘tax cuts for the rich’ bill is massively unpopular. His tax returns have never been disclosed (and this may be an issue for the Special Inquiry). The Democrats will undoubtedly take over Congress in 2018 and will very likely institute proceedings against Trump. Also,Trump doesn’t respond well to pressure, obviously, and his hitting out will finally become so unpalatable that there will be a general uprising against him, and his cronies, which will probably lead to what the Americans call a ‘constitutional crisis’. The next few months will be, I predict, the most fascinating as well as the most devastating period in modern US history. Glad I’m able to observe from a hopefully safe distance.

Recently, a list of Australia’s 200 richest people was published. It’s been widely reported that of those 200, only 22 were women; just over 10% – a figure that has apparently held good for some years. But while this is a useful first indication of wealth imbalance along gender lines, it would pay to look more closely at the figures, though this is hard to do, given the secrecy surrounding the wealth of some, and the complexities surrounding and conditioning the wealth of others. Quite a few of these wealthy women appear to be heiresses or ‘sleeping partners’ (in a business sense, but who knows?) rather than active business types, and even leaving this aside, I’m pretty sure that if I could do the maths on all these fortunes, the figure for women would amount to considerably less than 10% of the whole.

These are the Australian figures. Would anybody dare to suggest that the figures for female wealth in China, say, would be any better? (information on wealth in China, like just about any other information from China, is virtually impossible to obtain). Or in Russia – currently rated (by New World Wealth) as the nation with the most unequal distribution of wealth in the world? Just as a guess, I’d expect, or at least hope, that the US and some European nations might be ahead of Australia in terms of female wealth, but if so it surely wouldn’t be by much. Ask a group of students who’s the richest man in the world and you’d get a few unsurprising answers, enthusiastically proclaimed. Ask them about the richest woman, and you’d get puzzled looks as they wonder why you asked such a question.

I’m no economist, and wealth per se isn’t an interest of mine, and I’m much more concerned to get women into leadership positions in science and politics, but clearly having 95% or more of the world’s wealth in the hands of the more fucked-up gender is a big problem, and a huge obstacle to the dethronement of patriarchy.

While I’m not pretending this might happen in the near future, it seems to me that the ultimate solution lies in women’s best weapon – collaboration, or ganging up. The pooling of resources – financial, intellectual, practical, even sexual. I’m not talking about war here, but I am talking about a struggle for power, a slow, persevering struggle built of connections and networks, transcendent of nation, culture, class and age. A struggle not against men but against patriarchy. A struggle which, with ultimate success, will leave all of us winners. You may say I’m a dreamer, but why is a world dominated by woman so absurd when a world dominated by men, the fucked-up world we have now, is apparently not?